The Indian Skimmer Is One of India's Most Endangered River Birds, Only the Chambal Can Save It

The Indian Skimmer (Rynchops albicollis) has a lower mandible that is measurably longer than its upper one, a trait so rare among birds globally that only three skimmer species in the world share it. It flies low over calm water, lower jaw slicing the surface, snapping shut the instant it touches a fish. This is not a generalist. Every part of its anatomy is committed to large, slow-moving rivers with clear shallows and open sandbars. When those rivers change, the bird has nowhere to adapt to.

The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), which has tracked this species across its Indian range for decades, estimates the global population at somewhere between 400 and 600 individuals. The IUCN lists it as Endangered. In practical terms, a single bad nesting season, one flood event timed wrong, one sandbar lost to dredging, can erase a meaningful percentage of the entire species in a single year.

The National Chambal Sanctuary, stretching across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, holds the largest known nesting concentration of Indian Skimmers left in the country. The river here still runs relatively undammed in its core stretch, and the wide, exposed sandbars that form during the dry season give breeding pairs the open ground they need. Skimmers nest directly on sand, no material, no structure, just a shallow scrape, which means the nest is invisible to the human eye and catastrophically vulnerable to anything that disturbs the bar: a boat, a herd of livestock, a sudden pre-monsoon flood.

Surveys by Wildlife Institute of India researchers have recorded colonies of 30 to 80 pairs at Chambal sites, which sounds modest until you calculate it against the global total. Other river systems, the Ganga, the Yamuna, the Ken, that once hosted skimmer colonies have seen populations collapse or disappear entirely over the past three decades.

Sand mining is the most direct threat. Skimmers choose sandbars that are stable, broad, and positioned away from dense riparian vegetation. Sand extraction physically removes the substrate the birds nest on, and the machinery and human activity that accompany it causes adults to abandon active nests. A 2019 study published in Bird Conservation International documented nest abandonment rates rising sharply at sites within two kilometres of active sand mining operations along Indian river systems.

Fishing nets strung across shallow channels kill skimmers that skim too low and too fast to avoid them. Feral dogs and monitor lizards raid ground nests. Irrigation withdrawals upstream lower river levels unevenly, sometimes exposing nesting bars to predators, sometimes flooding them at the wrong moment in the breeding cycle. The monsoon itself is not the problem, skimmers time their nesting to finish before the rains. The problem is that human water management has made river behaviour less predictable, and the bird's narrow nesting window has no slack built into it.

The BNHS and local forest department teams at the Chambal sanctuary now run active nest-guarding programmes during the breeding season, roughly February to June. Wardens mark colony locations, restrict boat movement near active bars, and work with local fishing communities to identify and remove nets in high-risk zones. Community involvement is not optional here, the sanctuary's buffer zones include villages whose livelihoods depend on the river, and enforcement without buy-in has historically failed.

The species also appears on Schedule IV of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, which provides legal protection but does not carry the same enforcement weight as Schedule I. Several ornithologists and conservation groups have called for an upgrade. Whether that reclassification happens depends less on the science, the population numbers make the case plainly, and more on administrative priority in a list that already carries gharials, river dolphins, and golden mahseer competing for the same limited attention.

Satellite tracking of individual birds, still limited by the logistical difficulty of fitting transmitters on a species this small and fast, has begun to map movement corridors between Chambal nesting sites and wintering grounds along the coasts of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. That data matters because protection focused only on the Chambal misses half the bird's annual cycle.

The Indian Skimmer does not need wilderness. It needs rivers that behave like rivers, with seasonal flood pulses that deposit and shape sandbars, with water clear enough to see fish near the surface, with banks that are not constantly reworked by machinery. The Chambal provides this partly because of what it lacks: fewer large dams in its protected stretch, lower agricultural encroachment along its banks, and a conservation history that began with the gharial and the dolphin and happened to leave room for everything else.

The skimmer's population has held at its current level not because the threats have eased but because the Chambal's remaining habitat is just sufficient to sustain minimal breeding. That is a narrow margin. A river bird that fishes by touch, nests on open sand, and times its entire reproductive cycle to a window of weeks has no biological redundancy to offer. The Chambal is not a refuge the skimmer chose. It is the last river that has not yet made itself impossible for the bird to live on.